Hockey season ends with one Cup, many questions

Published 4:00 am, Friday, June 12, 2009

Chronicle columnist, Ray Ratto, stands for a photograph inside the studio on Tuesday Jan. 27, 2008 in San Francisco,Calif.

Chronicle columnist, Ray Ratto, stands for a photograph inside the studio on Tuesday Jan. 27, 2008 in San Francisco,Calif.

Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle

Hockey season ends with one Cup, many questions

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The National Hockey League season ends tonight, we promise, and in the only real measuring stick that matters, it ends with the two best teams playing a seventh game for the Stanley Cup. What else could you possibly want out of a sport? These are happy times indeed.

Meanwhile, back here in the distant outpost that is San Jose, happy isn't really on the table. "Profoundly unsettled" is far more accurate.

General manager Doug Wilson has not yet frontally attacked the issues he said he would tackle in the franchise's Brenda Lee ("I'm Sorry") phase, but there is still time for that. The trade season typically doesn't get started until after the playoffs end, and with the draft three weeks away, lots of body parts are likely to be shifted about in due time.

But never mind that. Without doing anything at all, the Sharks are already thigh-deep in turmoil. Starting with the makeup of their division.

The Phoenix Coyotes, the traditional bottom-feeders of the Pacific Division, look increasingly like the California Golden Seals - defunct. Blackberry inventor/billionaire Jim Balsillie has a firm $212 million offer to buy the team and move it to Hamilton, Ontario. That deal may include a $100 million relocation-and-nuisance fee imposed by the NHL, which has gone to court to fight the sale of the team. A Canadian judge has not been terribly impressed with the league's philosophical arguments, but seems to be fine with the ransom demand. In other words, the Coyotes, once the Winnipeg Jets, may be Canada's team again before long.

This development means one of two things, if in fact Balsillie spends his way into the Board of Governors meetings. One, the Sharks will have a new divisional partner, and geographic logic would make that team Vancouver, a much better team than Phoenix by any measure. Or if One isn't true, Two means that the Sharks now have more irritating trips across the country, picking up a Pacific city on the shores of Lake Ontario. Neither One nor Two is a good development.

To the east-by-southeast, the Dallas Stars just overthrew their government. Owner Tom Hicks is looking at a financial disaster in his co-ownership of English Premiership power Liverpool. He and co-owner George Gillett, who just sold the Montreal Canadiens, have to refinance their $587 million debt by July 24 in a terrible lending market, and he also wants to sell the Texas Rangers. As for his management of the Stars, he fired co-general manager Brett Hull, demoted the other co-GM, Les Jackson, and replaced both chairs with the one that holds former player Joe Nieuwendyk.

Nieuwendyk, in turn, fired respected coach Dave Tippett on Wednesday and replaced him with Marc Crawford, who has had three other gigs, not including his most recent one with Hockey Night in Canada. What this means in terms of personnel remains to be seen, as Dallas has some intriguing players but perhaps not intriguing enough for Crawford.

More to the point, though, the Stars may not be active spenders for a while, at least until Hicks figures how to move the Rangers and extricate himself from the crushing debt load of his Liverpool buy. This, at least peripherally, is good for the Sharks.

But most interesting of all is how the Detroit Red Wings fare in all of this. After another deep run that ought to result in another Stanley Cup (they are playing at home, after all), the Wings showed more age and thinning tread. They may end up being today's champs, but one has to wonder more seriously about their chances for 2010.

Their core players are still superb, but Pavel Datsyuk, Henrik Zetterberg, Nicklas Lidstrom, Valteri Filppula and Johan Franzen are all difficult players with which to cope. And as the league's oldest team, it may have to reinvent itself. The long list of injuries the Wings have endured makes their choices this summer even more complicated. The Wings aren't going anywhere, but it is fair to say that their arc has leveled off and may in fact begin to decline. That can't be anything but good for the Sharks.

There are, of course, the other moving parts here. Pittsburgh remains better than San Jose and in fact has widened the gap based on performance. Chicago has passed the Sharks by any reasonable analysis, St. Louis and Columbus suddenly are part of the mix, and Anaheim is still Anaheim.

The Sharks don't have the financing issues many teams have, but theirs is a more psychic problem that even if fixed with a strategic trade or two doesn't necessarily make them a prohibitive favorite to do anything, as they were a year ago.

In other words, trading Patrick Marleau may make everyone feel good, but the hockey world is changing around them at a dramatically faster pace. And when we mean "world," we include the geographic sense.

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